Despite their hoopla, most international conferences on the environment fail to deliver. The most recent example is the World Conference on Sustainable Development, which took place in August 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Beyond the speeches and press coverage about the dire state of the Earth’s environments and many of its peoples, little occurred to correct these states and I predict little will.

This conference was a ten-year follow-up on the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro, heralded by the United Nations as a “landmark conference” that “put sustainable development on the map.” Today what remains is a paper action plan called Agenda 21, the environmental goals of which, in the polite language of the U.N., “have not been fully realized.” Ditto the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has been signed by 165 nations, but “most industrialized countries did not meet the voluntary goal of reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000.”

If this sounds impatient and cynical, so be it. As Jack Beatty, senior editor of The Atlantic concludes, it seems that it will take nothing less than “an environmental September 11” to goad nations into swift, sure global action on climate, environment and society. Failing that, we continue to suffer from a lack of international will, a comfortable inertia in the short-term status-quo, and a willful decision not to connect the environmental dots.

For the past 10 years, almost every issue of Science, the premier professional scientific journal in the US, has connected the environmental dots. To quote Beatty, the dots show that “for the first time in human history, irreversible damage to the biosphere impends.” In June 2002, the EPA told the U.N. that global warming could cause coastal areas of the U.S. to disappear.

The evidence of global warming is pervasive, from the dramatic 100-year rise in average global temperatures to the rates at which glaciers are melting. Montana’s Glacier National Park needs to be renamed; most of its namesake glacier has disappeared in the past 75 years. Alpine plants are spreading to higher elevations by 12 feet per year. Birds are breeding earlier; plants are flowering earlier.

A wholesale northward shift of butterflies and other pollinating insects is under way, with potentially devastating disruption of plant pollination cycles, agricultural systems and natural ecosystems. The shift of animals, plants and microbes in response to global warming means that disease and pest organisms will spread to new areas.

Science also tells us that in 2002 one billion people “have no access to clean water,” two billion lack adequate sanitation, 1.5 billion breathe air rated substandard by the World Health Organization, and millions of poor farmers cannot keep their soils fertile.

Countries now pour three million tons of toxic pesticide on their agricultural lands every year and overfish two-thirds of the world’s stocks. In only 50 years we’ve lost a fifth of our topsoil and a third of our forests. Coral reefs worldwide are dying at a much faster rate than previously thought due to the triple whammy of global warming, overfishing and pollution. Animals, plants and microbes worldwide are becoming extinct at a rate thought to be 1000 times greater than the natural extinction rate since dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

From Chesapeake Bay to the central-Florida coasts, over-harvesting of blue crabs may be triggering the colossal die-off of salt marshes, which temper coastal flooding, filter mainland run-off, act as nurseries for commercially important fish, and protect barrier islands that buffer shorelines from erosion. All of these are economic issues.

To date, international attempts to stem the tide resemble the finger in the dike. After the 1992 Earth Summit, the World Bank and the U.N. established the Global Environmental Facility to fund major projects in developing countries, such as building dams or fostering sustainable practices. In ten years, it has provided a mere $4.2 billion.

What’s to be done? Let’s start with facing facts. Managing the environment is a long-term economic issue, not a tree-hugging one. The environment is a global economic commons. It requires smart, sustainable economic use and responsible economic planning from all nations. It’s in our national security, health and economic interests for all nations to reduce greenhouse gases, safeguard the food supply in the world’s oceans and agricultural lands, sustain the world’s natural resources, move to clean energies and stem the pollution of air, water and soils.

Let’s face the fact that money alone is not the solution. Science and social enlightenment are imperatives for a healthy economic environmental commons. As Alan Leshner, Science’s executive publisher points out, whether it’s the genetics of crop plants or wireless communication, developing countries will need knowledge transfer in science and technology to implement lasting environmental solutions. And environmental solutions won’t happen in many of these countries until they gain enlightened political systems, progressive social institutions and control of exploding population growth.

Finally, let’s face the fact that we live in a single environmental world. When Asia coughs, America sneezes. When Ohio belches smoke from coal-fired power plants, Maine breathes acid rain. When one North Atlantic country overfishes, five other countries lose fish, a fishing industry and thousands of jobs. What happens in one corner of the world might soon affect your corner.

We can’t hide from the economic and health impacts of overspending or fouling our global environmental capital. Let’s start connecting the environmental dots.